Looks like the recent PayPal India chaos – whereby the personal account holders couldn’t withdraw money to Indian banks – has come to an end! When I tried to withdraw money to my bank account last week, it asked me to declare a purpose for the proceeds received through PayPal (Screenshot below).

This is definitely a great move. As I have always maintained, the online income earners need to comply to government rules and regulations while making money. In principle they are bringing in foreign exchange (Forex) to India that’s not accounted for and sometimes not taxed.

New requirements by PayPal India

The purpose of withdrawal of money – or in other words source of income – needs to be declared only when you withdraw funds. The following are the reasons available as options now and they have a beautiful description of the same in a help screen. Bloggers are supposed to choose Freelance Journalism as per the description given there in.

In addition, as of yesterday each PayPal India account holder needs to provide the following information to keep your PayPal account active:

1. Your Mobile phone number
2. Your PAN Number

At the moment, they seem to allow skipping this screen but I am sure this will be made mandatory soon. The mobile number will be used for clarification by banks as how the money was earned and the Income Tax PAN (Personal Account Number) id will be used to track your income records and financial transactions.

[There is a bug in the screen that asked for the PAN number. Last night I entered my PAN number but it did not accept it stating that the format is not correct. Looks like they are still testing or fixing it]

What does it mean to bloggers and Internet Marketers in India?

Well, many student bloggers may not have a PAN number yet and some of them who are not adults yet will not be entitled to have one. In principle they cannot use PayPal in the near future.

Those who are already having a PAN number, can now conform to RBI regulations and be decent Indian citizens to pay taxes for everything that they earn. I know a lot of them won’t like it but that’s what you are expected to do. Evading taxes won’t help you or the country!

If you think that you can now switch to other online payment mechanisms, even they will be forced to conform to RBI rules soon enough. Moreover, I feel that all those online forex trading sites will be monitored for their illegal activities from the Indian soil (I hear have some of them have customer relationship offices in India)

In principle, be decent and pay taxes for whatever you earn online!

I am Happy!

Being somebody who pay income tax for each and every rupee earned – via employment salary, online income, bank interest, capital gains etc – I am really happy with this move by RBI. Such norms and rules are required to make our financial system stronger and well regulated which is one of the reasons why the Indian economy didn’t quite have a recession while others suffered! This will also help all of us to become good netizens!

Happy Money Making and Don’t forget to Pay your Taxes!

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Exactly two years ago, I had maintained that facebook is going to witness explosive growth over its competition. Today it has actually done it and well beyond expectations at that. It’s no more a mere social networking platform but also a place where people market their products and promote their brands.

Facebook fan pages have become one of the bare minimum ingredients for any company in order to successfully build its brand and online campaigns (even for offline success). Last night, I spend some time to build a small fan page for DollarShower and I strongly recommend that you build one for your business today! Creating a fan page is as simple as 1-2-3 as explained in this post.

Why do you need a fan page?

As I mentioned in a recent post, facebook is THE Internet Marketing platform for 2010. Online marketing in this context may not be direct marketing or banner advertising alone. The modern day marketing revolves a lot around networking and indirect discussions whereby at some point the customers will find you and your services/products based on their past engagements, tweets or chats with you. Excuse my ignorance if it’s not the case – I am not a marketing guru.

A facebook fan page is an excellent mechanism to find new people who are interested in your brand and retain your existing fans mainly because it adds the social networking angle to it. And that part is more powerful than any offline campaigns, telephone calls, surveys etc. The SocNet’s viral networking nature and facebook’s market leadership on that makes it the ideal online place to build your brand as compared to a twitter homepage or a Squido lens. Moreover, there’s no limit to what you can do on a facebook fan page.

[A facebook fan page is not the same as your facebook profile. The facebook profiles are mainly for individuals where as for you build a fan page for your business or brand. The other important aspect is that a facebook profile maintains (administrates) one or more fan pages as there is no concept called fan page account.]

Do blogs require fan pages?

My logical answer would be ‘NO’ and why? Blogs themselves are mini SocNets and you can do all your link sharing, collaboration, discussions etc on your blog itself and hence why do you need networking related brand building outside that? The reason is that you may not be able to penetrate into masses so easily unless you tap into something facebook’s popularity. Hence it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a fan page for your blog. However, if you maintain a page only to syndicate your blog posts, it is not going to yield any results. To get the best out of your facebook fan page, you need to be more active (much more than your blog itself) on your page, encourage discussions, post useful links and threads and keep helping your fans with their queries. You have to basically keep their interests high around what you have to offer!

How to create a facebook fan page?

It is so easy to build a fan page on facebook and perhaps you already read it on 100 other blogs. However, since I went through this process only yesterday, let me jot down the steps involved in building a facebook fan page once again here.

• Go to the facebook fan page create link to create a new fan page. You have to have a facebook account to create one.
• Select the category of your business, give the new fan page a name (usually your brand name) and keep it invisible till a time when you are ready to publish it
• Provide your company details (founded year/date, mission description) in the info area
• To create a profile picture, just upload your brand logo (or any alternative to the same) and remember to create a thumb image of the same that helps to track your own threads. Please remember to keep the profile picture of width 200px for best results. You may add additional photos related to your business to the fan page album, at this point.
• If you have a blog or website, you may import the blog’s content (RSS) at this point, using the Notes button at the top
• At this point, your basic fan page is ready and you may publish it.

You may still not have a good looking and friendly URL (something like facebook.com/mypage). For this, you have to wait till you get a good number of fans (25 for now) on board.

You can use the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) to build cool custom fan pages but that topic is not in the scope of this little post. Perhaps, I can write about it some other day. In the mean time, please join my fan page though there’s nothing much there yet (I will be adding a fan page widget on this blog soon)

Please feel free to share your facebook fan page links in your comments as well.

Happy Blogging!

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In October last year, I had written a review on QueryAds as an alternative to the Google AdSense program as well as an effective search advertising option. Recently they launched an affiliate program and this post is a short review on the same.

The QueryAds publisher network is an excellent value proposition for bloggers and webmasters because they share 70% of their revenue with publishers and the payout happens when a $50 threshold is reached. And now they have an unmatched affiliate program where a 10% of the referral revenues for life is given to the affiliates.

QueryAds Affiliate Program details

The following are some of the salient points of this referral program.

• As I mentioned above, 10% of all referral income – from both advertisers and publishers – goes to the affiliates
• Simple referral report that shows your referral income from advertisers and publishers on the same page. These reports are updated on a daily basis
• Low payout threshold – you get paid when your referral earnings reach $50 and you are paid monthly via PayPal
• High quality, light weight gif banners that offers better click-through-rate for affiliates

Signing up as an affiliate is a 5-minute process. All that you have to provide is your login, address details and PayPal address and you are ready to publish the referral banners (such as the one below) on your website that very moment.

You may sign up with QueryAds affiliate program using the above banner (my referral link). After all, the potential of earning 10% of earnings of all your referrals for life is not a bad deal at all.

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After a week of inactivity on the blogging front, I tried to moderate the pending comments today. Unlike my previous reactions on the spam folder, this time around, I decided to give some respect to the spammers and actually read many of those comments. To be frank, I do not entirely blame them for their backdoor marketing efforts. On the other hand, I thought, some of them are really very creative and childishly funny at times.

The following are some of the very interesting spam comments that I keep receiving and my answers to them, if I had actually moderated them in. I am sure, all of you must have gone through similar situations and hence please feel free to add some of your greatest spam comments as real comments here.

1. You are a very smart person

I thought I knew that before you figured out.

2. Your website doesn’t seem to work on PhaseOut 5.0. Thought of informing you.

We have minimal support for PhaseOut and that will be phased out soon.

3. I found your blog via bing search and bookmarked this page. Keep up good work.

Oops! When I searched bing, I couldn’t see this page at all!

4. You have excellent content here

Thaks for the reassurance. You have been very kind and consistent with your support over the past few months.

5. You should add a subscribers section to this blog, I think I’m addicted

I forgot to throw a sign-up popup like a couple of others do.

6. I love to watch you write!

Sorry man, I am straight!

7. hey everyone

Hi!

8. Thanks for publishing about this. There’s a heap of great tech information on the internet. You’ve got a lot of that info here on your website. I’m impressed – I try to keep a couple blogs fairly on-going, but it’s a struggle sometimes. You’ve done a solid job with this one. How do you do it?

You are so damn inefficient man, brevity is the soul of spam.

9. Hi, i must say fantastic blog you have, i stumbled across it in Google. Does you get much traffic?

I does no traffic

10. ? ??? ??: ???????!!
??????? ???? ?????? ?????? – ???? ?????? ?????? ? ??????? ?????
?????????? ???? ?????? ??? ??????? ????????????? ???? ?????? ??? ???????
?????????? ?????????? ?? ?????? ????????: ????? ????? ?? ?????? ????????
????? ???????? ?? ?????????? ????? ???????? ?? ????????
?????? ????? ???????? ?? ???????? ????? ???????? ?? ???????? ??????
??????? ?????????? ???? ?????? – ?????????? ???? ??????
?????????? ?????????? ?????????????: ?????? ?????????? ?????????? ??????
? ????????????? ????? ???????? ? ????????????? ????? ???????? ?? ??????
??? ????? ???????? ?? ???? ???????? – ????? ???????? ?? ???????? ???
????? ???????? ?? ??????: ????? ????????? ???????? ?? ???????

? ??? ??: ???????!!

Looks like you have too many questions for me. Can we set up a call?

Over to you…

Do you have any interesting and funny spam comments on your blog right now? Please feel free to share them. Don’t worry, they would be recovered from the spam folder and brought to day light!

Happy Spamming!

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It has been only a week since PayPal India stopped processing all money transactions to personal accounts in India. They have also blocked the withdrawal of available funds. Apart from receiving the AdSense checks, most of the Indian bloggers and freelancers would have used PayPal for online money transfers and hence the future of their hard earned money remains uncertain.

A lot of people think that making money online in countries like India is a really easy to do thing. Indeed, it’s so easy to get started but with all its related risks (Read Online business risks) and a lot more related uncertainities.

Online Business Models

Most online money makers in India (and several other Asian countries) work mainly around the following business models

• Blog on internationally accepted topics and drive US traffic and earn money via advertisements (mainly AdSense and sometimes other networks and private ads)
• Writing services and other related freelancing opportunities
• Specialized services – graphics, banners, themes, other web development services
• Selling goods via eBay
• Online forex trading etc

As far as I know, not many Indians are keen on doing affiliate marketing or any MLM stuff. However, even for the most harmless (and capital investment free) areas such as blogging to make money online there are hurdles and ongoing issues.

Main hurdles and issues

When it comes to one’s online rights, India is not as bad as China. Nobody really blocks or censors websites in India. However, there are other areas where policies – mainly from the government – prevent people from doing free mode online business from India.

The main issue here is the strictly controlled foreign exchange policy. I would assume that the recent PayPal issues are mainly around the RBI (Reserve Bank of India)’s guidelines related to the foreign exchange policy. Due to the same reason, even online currency trading is not possible from India. All that is legally permited is the futuress trading of currencies – that too only USD-INR pair on wide spreads.

The high rate of Income tax is another key issue that freelancers pay here assuming that they are paying taxes in India for their online income. The rate of income tax is 30% for the higher income groups and to make it worse due the huge difference in USD buy/sell rates, most people end up loosing a lof of money in exchange rates as well.

Ban from the major online income contributors such as Google AdSense is another big issue. Most of those people who get banned by AdSense are from this part of the world (many for valid reasons, I must add, but not all).

Lack of proper cyber crime enforcement is another big issue here. Usually, only when some high profile issue happens, the cyber squad gets into action. If somebody is hacking to your online accounts or even defame your online business’ goodwill for that matter, nobody really cares.

Way forward

In my opinion, if you are completely depending on your online income to support your financial needs, you may need to think twice now. It’s not going to be very easy for anyone to continuously innovate and sustain the online income models. Online business (especially blog income) can be thought of as an additional income but never the only thing or primary income stream that you should be banking on. It’s time to find an offline regular job, if that is not the case already.

Happy Money Making!

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I recently came across this amazing free SEO analytics site called SERP Analytics. At the first glance, it looked to me like a normal search site but as I started digging deeper, I realized that it has got a set of powerful tools for SEO specialists, Internet Marketers and bloggers.

SERPAnalytics.com is an online solution and hence you don’t need to download anything to get started – not even a browser toolbar as in the case of some other solutions. Some of the exciting features of this include detailed site statistics from SEO point of view, top paying AdSense keywords, SEO parameters under live search results from Google, Yahoo or Bing etc and lot more as explained below.

Salient features of SERP Analytics

The following are some of the key features available with this suite of tools:

Search Results Analytics

The comprehensive search analytics tool allows you to analyze the search results (SERPs) for a particular keyword or domain to come up with the following information

- More than a dozen SEO parameters (such as PR, Yahoo backlinks, Quantcast rank, Number of search clicks received, whois record etc.) right under the search result. If you use the domain name for search, it is also a great way to see the SEO parameters of all internal (or linked) pages. You can customize the parameters that you want to show
- The above mentioned parameters is available for Google, Yahoo and Bing
- The SERP summary is available in a separate float window by the side of search results
- Original search results (without SEO parameters) from the selected Search Engine can be still seen in a separate window
- Archived SERPs
- Domain summary lists some of the important aspects about a particular site including its top keyword ranks, search traffic received etc.

SEO Tools

The tools page of SERPAnalytics provides the following SEO Tools.

- Google Data Center tool lets you to research the search results from multiple data centers simultaneously
- Country Tool allows you identify SERP positioning of your keyword up to five selected countries at a time. This feature is available again for all three leading search engines

(There are a few other tools available in the SEO Tools section which seems to be reorganized and regrouped as I write this post)

Top paying keywords

Yet another cool feature of this site is the Free Top 10000 keyword tool that keeps getting updated from time to time. This keyword list can be filtered, searched for and sorted based on parameters such as cost per click (CPC), number of searches, number of clicks reported etc. This can also be downloaded as a CSV file. So next time you want some hot search words that bring more money per click, you know where to look for.

Conclusion

The SERPAnalytics site has got a lot more features than I could cover in this review. It is certainly one of the best SEO tools that is available online for free. Please check out SERP Analytics yourself and provide your feedback as comments here.

Happy SEO!

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Well, that’s a question I keep asking myself from time to time. A lot of people start blogging mainly because they were introduced to and inspired by certain blogging idols or super successful bloggers. Some others do blog because they think it’s cool and the rest do it for other benefits such as online income.

However, too many bloggers ditch blogging half way through even before giving it a whole-hearted attempt. This is mainly because they did not originally have the ingredients to be successful in online writing. So what does it take to be a successful blogger who takes blogging as a serious hobby or even as a profession?

#1 Writing skills

Blogging is first about writing! Unless you possess decent writing skills – even when writing about technical topics for that matter – blogging is not meant for you. Having writing skills alone won’t be sufficient if you do not enjoy writing.

#2 Creativity

So you are good at writing! But people will soon get bored of glorified rubbish unless you are creative and innovative with your ideas. Most successful bloggers already know the next few topics they are going to write about. Many times those who do a lot of research and online/offline reading always have enough innovative things to write about.

#3 Originality

When was the last time you wrote or read something very original on a blog? Many upcoming bloggers perish because they depend on other feeder blogs for ideas. The most successful bloggers are those who have the most original ideas to write about. It is acceptable if you promote inspired or stale ideas once in a while but more often you should ignite your own new ideas in order to become successful in blogging.

#4 Networking Skills

The main difference between online and offline writing is that you get your readers’ feedback instantly in the case of online writing. This is mainly because of the collaborative nature of blogging as well as the capabilities of its supporting paraphernalia (social media, social networking, subscription etc). Hence those who network better, open to feedback and work on their shortcomings will become successful sooner or later. The online networking skills enables a blogger to build a community around his topics and ideas not only to get accepted at the first level but also to become the evangelists of the same over the web.

#5 Sustainability

Finally, to persist with any hobby, passion or profession you need to have a lot of drive within you. You should be very good at time management and engage yourself – on a continuous basis – with all aspects concerning blogging. This includes understanding the trends and adapting accordingly, have self-defined goals (in the positive direction) and work relentlessly towards achieving them with focus. It is the persistence that makes a blogger a real super blogger!

Conclusion

There may be ten or fifteen other things that one can define as the qualities of a serious blogger but I believe that the above five are the major points. Now let me ask you bloggers :

(1) Are you putting serious efforts to become the next big name in the blogosphere?
(2) What are those two or three things that you do with respect to your blogging to sustain for long term?

Happy Blogging!

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Interactive Marketing is an evolving trend in Marketing whereby the customers’ inputs, thoughts and requirements are recorded and remembered – either from web inputs or analytics – and worked upon to provide solutions that best match their needs. Interactive Marketing is not Internet Marketing though web is certainly one of the major channels that helps to draw decisions based on various online data points (e.g. search phrase) regarding what the customer is looking for.

As per a recent Forrester report on interactive marketing, the money will gradually move away from traditional marketing and advertising channels into social media, mobile and email marketing. By 2014, interactive marketing will hit $55billion (in US alone) and this will be already 21% of the overall marketing spend. This post summarizes the findings from this report.

Interactive Marketing trends

The following are the bullet points from the forrester report:

• Search marketing still leads the interactive spend whereby 80% of marketers still depend on search advertising and SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• In 2009, 64% marketers already use social media applications to promote their products and this will grow further
• As against the predictions, email marketing continues to be an economical way to promote products as search marketing and advertising spend took an interim dip during recession
• Reaching your customers with mobile applications is a strategic advertisement model for the future (e.g. iPhone apps – there are already 40 thousand of them out there)
• Display advertising spend is slowly recovering after a few bad quarters
• Search marketing will slowly move away from text advertising to more media (video, images…) driven advertising
• Average time spend on the internet by US adults has now overtaken the average TV viewing time (big change from 2007) – the newspaper industry continues be challenged as well

Downloads

Complete Forrester report on interactive marketing 847KB: Very good read)

Make Money Online opportunities

The above trends indicate that there’s a huge make money online opportunity waiting for online marketers. You just need to hold on and keep updating your content to become successful out there. The next five years belongs to social media and interactive marketing!

Happy Money Making!

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There is no doubt that the Thesis from DIY Themes is an exceptional WordPress theme that is so easy to customize. As our blogger friend ZK rightly says “If god blogged, he would use the Thesis theme” which I agree to some extend assuming that the God is so bad at PHP that he could not afford to write his own WordPress theme.

Jokes apart, I have been having tough time with DIY folks – not with respect to the piece of software they have written but with the affiliate program (and the system) that they are offering. As you know, I am really interested in promoting selected good products on this blog as long as they fetch me some money via affiliate or referral sales.

Issues with the Thesis Affiliate Program

As you probably know I had run a Thesis, HostGator, OIOPublisher offer in the month of October whereby most of the affiliate income earned was being reimbursed to my referrals (I still do this). As part of this scheme, I also sold some Thesis theme licenses and the following was the situation with respect those sales.

Licenses sold: 7
Referral sales immediately recognized by the affiliate system: 3
Referral sales recognized after several support queries: 2
Referral income yet to be recognized: 2

The thesis affiliate support person, at that time, responded to my mails acknowledging that they have flaws in their affiliate system that sometimes does not recognize sales and they had to do it manually case by case. They also have a huge backlog on this manual process and to avoid all these they were planning to move to a new affiliate platform (Not sure if that’s the case yet)

Now my problem is that, I had offered discounts to my referrals which I mostly paid (except one case) on time expecting the money to come from the affiliate payout. Since it did not happen I am running on loss here with respect to that particular deal, which I do not like for sure.

Second problem, I am facing with the thesis affiliate links is that their online certificates seem to have expired and hence visitors to this blog (due to the affiliate code placed) are sometimes thrown an invalid certificate error. I am yet to remove the affiliate links as I am hoping that they will correct this issue. Also, since the product itself is really good, I am not removing the links as yet – Any inconvenience to my readers is regretted.

General problems with affiliate links

The affiliates face several issues with various affiliate programs that are available at the moment. The following are some the issues that I have faced.

• Affiliate clicks are not recognized at times mainly due to the poor logic (‘last click-through from’ logic)
• Even if the clicks are recognized, the sales will not be recognized against a partifular affiliate, because of the work flow completion issues (landing page to thank you page logic)
• The payment process takes too long (in some cases as long as three months) for unexplained reasons
• Minimum payment requirement sometimes is too high even for small products. Why can’t they release money on a monthly basis as soon as they mature?
• Instead of placing a simple HTML link code, sometimes they place huge scripts that could be malicious
• Some links and banners are non standardized (e.g. heavy JPG images, non-standard HTML)
• Affiliate support is poor and many times do not respond back. The support quality has deteriorated since recession hit (probably due to understaffing)

At this point of time, I should also mention some of the referral schemes that are run in a highly professional manner. Simon Emery of OIO Publisher is one such gentleman who is willing to listen to issues and always improvise. I also felt that the HostGator affiliate scheme is clean and organized.

Disclaimer

The emotions expressed here have nothing to do with the Thesis theme itself – It continues to rock and I still like it. But in order to promote the theme, there’s a certain incentive that we are all supposed to get and it’s just not happening in a consistent and transparent way.

Happy Blogging!

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Last month I had written a post about the basics of online forex trading. At that time I mentioned about the eToro forex trading platform where you can start a Forex trading account for just $50 (eToro supports PayPal transfer) and start trading instantly.

The eToro trading system now has improved features such as visual trading and support forex trading with investments as low as $2.5 per trade. This means that you now have the possibility of getting forex exposure for just a couple of dollars (Earlier the minimum investment requirement per trade was $25)

Forex Trading is no rocket science

As mentioned in my first post about Forex trading, it is one of the easiest (risky as well if not careful) mechanisms to make money online without having a blog or website. All that you need to do is to (1) sign up eToro (click the banner below to learn more) (2) Fund your account via PayPal or Credit Card and (3) start trading immediately.

eToro supports a FREE practice account where you can learn the tricks of Forex trading without putting your real money. Once you are comfortable with the buy/sell part, you can put real money starting with smaller amounts. With your eToro account you can not only trade all major currencies but also trade commodities such as Silver and Gold.

Related Posts

Online Forex Trading for Beginners

Happy Online Money Making via Forex!

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